I spent the majority of my weekend in Shinjuku. After school on Friday, I got on the Tsukuba Express and rode to Minami-Naregayama, where I transferred to the JR for Kita-Fuchu. I was planning to stay with a woman from CouchSurfing, but I got lost from some bad directions, and I had to be in Shinjuku by about 7 anyway, so I just gave up and said thanks, but I’ll stay with a friend. (I didn’t actually have one to stay with, but I worked it out.) I got back on the JR and rode over to Shinjuku.
I’m trying to describe Shinjuku properly, here. It is…a maze. It is busy, crowded, and tall; you have to read very tall signboards to find out what businesses are in any given building. Shinjuku is up all night, Shinjuku is easy to get lost in, Shinjuku is confusing. I grew to enjoy it, but on Friday evening I was not a happy camper, because I was lost. I got there at 5 and didn’t need to get to the bar for DPHH until 7, so I was wandering around…and around…trying to find it. I went into an internet cafe and paid ¥100 for 30 minutes; I took pictures of Google Maps pages with my camera so I could have that with me. No luck – I was horribly, horribly lost. From 5-6 I was walking around, 6-6:30 in the net cafe, 6:30-7:25 walking around lost, and finally at 7:30 I arrived at the bar. That interim five minutes was actually when I finally found a police box and asked the cops how to get there…turned out it was just a few minutes away.
DPHH was pretty cool. There was only one Japanese woman who knew ASL, so she and I chatted for a while until Merritt showed up. Merritt and I have a mutual friend, so we thought it would be fun to meet, and I was so hungry to talk in ASL. We chatted with each other and a few more native signers, it was wonderful. The Japan/Ivory Coast game was on the TVs, so it was noisy and there was a lot of smoke, but it was fine.
I finally left around 10:30 and went back to the internet cafe. I bought a 5-hour block for ¥1200, intending to go to another internet cafe after my time was up. I didn’t try to sleep or anything, I just goofed around online. At 2:30am I remembered that the 5-hour blocks are only available until 3:00am, so even though I had about an hour left, I departed for the other net cafe. Unfortunately, it was closed, and I found myself walking around Shinjuku at 3:00am. I knew I had seen more net cafes, it was just a matter of finding them again in the maze of pedestrian avenues that is Shinjuku.
I finally got to another place and it was really nice. All their full-flat cubicles were full, so I got five hours in a reclining chair with footrest for something like ¥1300. They had a vending machine with hot food like chicken fingers and such; I got French fries for ¥350 which was expensive, but they were tasty, and it was fun to get nice hot fries out of a vending machine! I surfed the web for a couple of hours, and finally managed to sleep for about 90 minutes. At around 7:00am, people started to leave, so all the slamming doors meant I was unable to sleep until it was time to go. I goofed around on the net for an hour before departing.
I knew there were two places I wanted to go: the Sanrio store in the basement of the same building as the net cafe, and the cat cafe down the street. Of course they weren’t open that early, so I ate and dawdled at Mister Donut, and then nursed some coffee at Starbucks. I eventually gave up and sat outside the Sanrio store for the last 15 minutes before opening time; the security guard was none too sure about me, even though I was obviously waiting for the store to open. Whatever. I looked at everything in the store, and ended up with another washcloth for my sweaty face (no idea what happened to my old one, weird) and a phone strap of Hello Kitty in a geisha costume.
Then it was off to the cat cafe to play with these guys for an hour and a half! This was a really big space, with a lot of cats; unfortunately they had a rule that you can’t pick them up, but to my surprise one of the staff spoke some English, and he told me a little about the cats.
And then I went to meet my friend Carrie!! We haven’t seen each other in a billion years, but she and her friend were in Tokyo for the week, so we met up while he went to a baseball game. We had lunch at Chaya which was pretty good, if on the expensive side. Chaya is in the restaurant section of the Isetan department store, and there’s another restaurant there called Vege China that advertises itself as “New Vegetable Dinning” [sic] but, oddly enough, is not at all vegetarian. Huh.
Carrie and I walked all around Shinjuku, and I felt much more comfortable and with a much better sense of direction than the night before. We went pretty much all over the very busiest part of Shinjuku, including down into the Subnade which is an underground mall/dining complex. Eventually I was tired, so we retrieved my heavy backpack from the coin locker at the JR station (I have got to pack lighter for these trips) and found where I was going to stay, the Hotel Tateshina.
Now, because I am living 100% on borrowed cash, I have been extremely frugal. I have been staying only at places that cost $25/nt or less – capsule hotels, the internet cafes, etc. But dammit, I was tired of budget living, and I hadn’t used a private shower or even a private toilet in three weeks. It was time for a private room, a Western bed, and my own bathroom. And oh man did I love it. I was happy just to be in there. In fact, if I had a place like that here in Tsukuba, I’d be the happiest girl in the world. (I have my own dorm room, but other girls are knocking around all day and night, and the facilities are shared.) I was smiling all night, just because of the wonderful privacy. After walking nonstop for 12 hours (got there about 8pm), I was really sore, so I took a nice hot bath and all the aches and pains went away got better. Japanese baths are always very deep, because they like to soak, so I got my whole body in there and felt so much better afterward. And in the morning, I had a nice hot shower, and the water stayed on the whole time! No lever-pressing to make the water come back on! And there was shampoo and soap!! I’m sure to most people the room would be small and shabby, but to me it was wonderful. They even had TV in the room, though I didn’t watch much – they had BBC News but it was dubbed into Japanese.
So today, Sunday, I met my friend again who I met the last weekend I was down in Tokyo. One of her daughters had an audition at Fuji TV in Odaiba; she is contracted with a modeling agency and has done some commercials and things like that. So I got to see the inside of the Fuji TV center, her daughter whispered to me that a foreigner like me would never get into Fuji TV so easily! But as a member of their party, I got a little badge (had to give it back, boo), and I got to see things. The audition was closed, but we chatted and I played games with her younger daughter while we waited.
Next we went to Nyanda Cafe which had a totally awesome cat-related shop (I bought stuff!), and then a whole bunch of kitties to pet. (Again, no picking up, I hate when they have that rule!) I got to pet a Cornish Rex, which was pretty cool, but unfortunately the Sphynx was sleeping in an off-limits area; we could see him through a window but I didn’t get to pet him. There were also lots of kittens in cages for adoption, and they say they prefer adoptees to live in a single family home, not an apartment, because apartment residents are more likely to move and leave the cat behind! The sign about adoption also said that you are supposed to take care of the cat for the rest of its life…it’s a cute kitten now, but it will grow up to be a cat, and you can’t get rid of it. All wise words, of course, but I would never have known them if I had gone by myself. My friend and both of her daughters are fully bilingual, so they translated signs and stuff for me. (My friend is Japanese-Italian and her husband is Italian-American.) The kittens chewed our fingers through their cages, it was so adorable…no milk coming out of my fingertips, sorry!
We went to Saizeriya for lunch, and I discovered that it is wonderful. Dirt-cheap food, including pizza, garlic bread, spaghetti, and all kinds of stuff, and for ¥180 you get all-you-can-drink at the drink bar which includes 7 sodas, coffee, tea, etc. There is one not far from the university, so I will definitely go there when I am feeling poor! The big plate of delicious spaghetti I ordered was only ¥299…how can you beat that price?! After we ate, we went back to the train station; when we separated, my friend’s daughter gave me one of the two small stuffed kitties she had bought. I tried to decline, but both her sister and her mother insisted she had bought it for me in the first place! SO sweet, she is only 7, and now I have a little calico kitten for my dorm room. 
I took the train back to Tsukuba (by way of Akihabara), and on the way back I fell asleep hard! Somebody tapped me and I woke up and the train was empty – we were at Tsukuba! Thank goodness it’s the end of the line, or I’d have been far from home! I walked back to the dorm and now I am super sleepy so I will end here.
